Do you love yoga and stretching? Enjoy the sensation of releasing and easing?
Stretches are great after an intense activity, exercise and physical loading. However, as no one body are the same, some of us have to be careful when and where we stretch because you may have hypermobile joints and unknowingly doing damage by over stretching.
What is hypermobility and the symptoms?
Joint hypermobility means that some or all of a person’s joints have an unusually large range of movement, such as touching toes and bending backwards can be easily done. This is due to hypermobile joints but it’s more of hyper elastic ligaments, tendons and muscle surrounding the joint. Allowing the joint to have excessive movement.
Many people with hypermobile joints don’t have any problems. For some people the extra flexibility may be a benefit. For example, ballet dancers or gymnasts.
But, not everyone's same. There are people with joint hypermobility can have symptoms like:
pain and stiffness in the joints and muscles
clicking joints
joints that dislocate easily
fatigue
recurrent injuries – like sprains
thin or stretchy skin
Varicose vein
Flat feet
Unfortunately, for this type of body, deep stretches and yoga type of activities aren’t very suitable. As you could potentially strain tendons, muscles, or ligaments by pushing its limit. You can still enjoy light and not too excessive range of movement stretches but always be mindful not to push the limit especially if you have an ongoing issue with dislocating or clicky joints.
Tips for hypermobility
After stopping the excessive range of motion stretches, it’s good to start with joint stability exercise, muscle strengthening exercise for the weak and over stretched joint. This type of exercise will help to re-train, re-set joints and surrounding tissues to protect itself from hyper mobile range of motion and stop your joint from spraining.
If you want the full benefit from your exercise, it's also important to improve your soft tissue health that might be limiting the movement and causes pain doing certain movement. Having remedial massage along with your exercise program is always a good idea.
As an RMT, the most common hypermobile joints that I see from client is
Hyper extended knee
Shoulder joint; rotation clicky shoulder
Straightened neck
Remedial massage can benefit hypermobility as the taut muscles and tendons are still under tension and can create trigger points and lack of hydration of the tissue. It's important to release the general tension but avoiding deep elongating, lengthening technique, by using more of cross fibre friction and circular friction and then lengthening the opposite 'short' muscle group. Also, finding myofascial adhesion and trigger points and releasing them helps improving overall soft tissue health.
Once you start these changes, you’ll start to feel the difference in quality of movement and gaining strength into the weak area of the body. Everything takes time but it’ll be worth for the long run of your own health.
So stop that stretch now, IF you have hypermobile joints!
Written by Seonkyo Kim; Dip. RMT
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